University of San Francisco
School of Education
Web Site Design - 0703-698-01
Spring 2001
Web Site Evaluation
www.atarde.com.br
Marcelo Carvalho
marcelo@carvalho.com
www.marcelo.carvalho.com
Introduction
For the purpose of this paper the website www.isinet.com/isi/hot/essays/selectionofmaterialforcoverage/23.html, which is a study of James Testa, Director, Editorial Development of ISI, a company that publishes scholarly bibliographic databases for the global research community, was used as review criteria model to be followed because of one main factor: It was the work researched by me that better focused the importance of both the content and the design in a website as website review criteria model. As a matter of fact the work is an explanation on how do they do the evaluation of a website, and it's content, to become acceptable to be part of their database.
The website chosen by me to be evaluated is www.atarde.com.br. It is a website of a major circulation newspaper in Brazil and it is used as online media for its regular publication as well as media for the latest local, country and around the world news.
...... Back to beginning .......
Review Criteria Topics
...... Back to topics .......
Authority & Accuracy
The evaluated site is a clear identified site, related to a publishing company established in 1912 and that has maintained a regular publication of a daily newspaper since than. Besides being an "online newspaper" with a very large quantity of subjects the website has maintained its objectives to be the electronic media source for its paper publication.
Because of that I regard it as a website of high credibility in a sense that represents its paper publication in a full manner. Indeed we should be careful for not take the credibility of a website as proposed as the publication credibility itself. For that, and because it is a daily renewed publication, we have to consider its history credibility and the maintenance of accuracy on its publication, what is out of scope of this project.
The content's authors are composed of hundreds of professional journalist and specific fields collaborators of well know capabilities, and the website itself, by the overall look, can be said that was developed and is maintained by capable and well prepared computer science and information systems professionals.
As a free online publication it has a portion of online advertising, what is comprehensible for this nature of publication. What is good to consider is that this advertising does not sponsor the editorial content, and it does not occupy large amount of screen's real estate.
...... Back to topics .......
Currency
As a daily online newspaper website it's frequency of updating is in a real time 24(hours)/7(days) basis and in a daily basis all its content is renewed completely. Because its older contents are kept in a database, we can say that it is a forever growing website. We also cans say that this behavior drives the website's authors to be concerned more with the responsibility about what they are publishing, because the contents are always kept available for future research. In the same manner as a regular paper printed newspaper does concern itself about what they are publishing.
...... Back to topics .......
Navigation and Design
Atarde.com.br website has a very good design and it has 48 main internal links, by subjects, that are available from every page besides it's home page. A column of all internal links is maintained at the screen's left side in all sub-links beside the home page. The links option from the main home page has to be open by a "drop window" button, probable because of screen real estate usage.
Navigation through the site is logical, and all links offered at a page are relevant and related to the page's topic. The design itself promotes understanding of the content, it is aesthetically pleasing and user friendly.
...... Back to topics .......
Workability
Being atarde.com.br a site designed to deliver news and information for free, it has probable chosen to use some of the latest animation software available to strengthen its ability to capture user's attention. In a matter of design this decision may be seen as correct but because of the amount of information exchanged by server and client computers it has shown as cumbersome.
If from one side the server may not have the capacity to supply every request on a fair amount of response time, and from the client side we never know if it is being served by speedy network lines. This important issue has shown, in this particular site, as its "Achilles' heel", making the response time for every query to long if considered a reasonable time for users seeking for online information.
In an example, from a very fast "T1" 1.5M bytes/sec connection, in a local area network (LAN), a client takes an average of thirty seconds to get the main home page loaded in full. For the internal links it takes an average of over fifteen seconds to have it loaded in full. If we take in consideration that every news matter is an internal link and if we want to search 100 published article at a given time, what is normal for a newspaper reader, it takes 25 minutes of our time only in wasting waiting download time, beside the time required to read the matter. And that I am saying when we use a "T1" line. From a regular "56k" dial up home line, much slower than the "T1" lines and its "LAN", it takes forever, making it impossible to browse this site with today's time availability.
...... Back to topics .......
Scope
The accomplishment of atarde.com.br website cover it's scope entirely and does not go beyond it. It covers the entirely paper publication and also gives views of the front page paper publication images itself, in two different forms: One form to be used to read and link and the other one to be used to capture the image in a perfect manner.
...... Back to topics .......
Audience Level
The propositus website express its matter in a correct, adequate and clear manner, successfully providing their readers with satisfactory and trustful information. In other words, it matches its audience.
...... Back to topics .......
Quality of Writing
The website editors are very much concerned with spelling and grammatical issues but being a online news provider it is susceptible of mistakes that are greatly pardoned, and those mistakes are not seen regularly.
...... Back to topics .......
Conclusion
In an overall view atarde.con.br website can be considered as an excellent one. It ranks in all, but one, of our givens criteria with an above average grade. In that specific criterion, workability, it has to come from a company managers' decision, the weighting of what is the better way to achieve their readers and if the chosen way is not making potential clients to be away of it for lack of possibility to spend that required amount of time to be able to navigate in an adequate way through their site.